R.I.P. Limewire, Stealing Music With You Will Be Missed

After battling with the music industry in the US court system for almost half a decade, a federal court in New York finally shut down peer-to-peer file sharing website Limewire with a permanent injunction, saying the program caused a “massive scale of infringement.”

Since Napster eventually collapsed under the strain of its legal battles, Limewire became the choice of 50 million users to download and share music illegally. It was founded in 2000 by Mark Gorton, a former Wall Street trader, and enjoyed its successes until 2006, when the RIAA decided to take action. With today’s decision, the representative body of the music industry of America stated:

For the better part of the last decade, LimeWire and Gorton have violated the law. The court has now signed an injunction that will start to unwind the massive piracy machine that LimeWire and Gorton used to enrich themselves immensely. In January, the court will conduct a trial to determine the appropriate level of damages necessary to compensate the record companies for the billions and billions of illegal downloads that occurred through the LimeWire system.

Limewire has tried to work on legal music downloading services and hopes to continue to do so in the future. Their last attempt, called Spoon, fell through because record labels were unhappy that it would take at least a year to shut down all the illegal filesharing servers that were on their system.